SON – Bếp Nhà Đãi Khách is a Vietnamese dining space in Ho Chi Minh City built around a simple idea: the atmosphere of a Vietnamese home can be translated into architecture, not through literal imagery, but through the way spaces are organised, connected, and inhabited.
The project takes the familiar domestic sequence of the veranda, kitchen, living and dining room, and formal sitting room, and reinterprets it across the third and fourth floors of an existing urban building. Rather than treating these references as decorative motifs, the design uses them as a spatial structure for hospitality: a restaurant that feels less like a venue and more like a house prepared to receive guests.
The experience begins at the lift lobby, conceived as a threshold between the city and the home. Traditional encaustic tiles line the floor, creating a quiet pause before the restaurant opens above. The existing neo-Haussmannian façade, finished in pebble-wash render, carries the memory of Vietnamese modernist residential architecture and establishes the project’s dialogue between inherited urban fabric and contemporary interior life.
On the third floor, cooking, gathering, and dining share one open volume. A pitched timber roof form is brought indoors, recalling the sheltering quality of the Vietnamese house while creating a generous communal space. In one corner, the merchandise area is designed as a small veranda within the restaurant, where objects, colour, and material details become part of the spatial experience rather than separate branding elements.
The fourth floor is more intimate. Folding partitions and sliding screen doors allow the rooms to open or close depending on the occasion. Overhead, timber and woven bamboo ceiling elements define the depth of the space, drawing from details found in Vietnamese modernist homes. Together, the two levels move between the communal and the private, from the kitchen table to the formal room.
The material palette follows the same domestic logic. Rubberwood, handcrafted encaustic tiles, terrazzo, locally sourced bamboo, handmade ironwork, and lacquer-red accents are chosen not as nostalgic references, but as materials already embedded in the memory of Vietnamese homes. A pendant light takes its form from the lồng bàn, the traditional food cover, reinterpreted as a luminaire. Baluster details from modernist houses reappear as ceiling elements, while a glass-fronted food cabinet recalls the household garde-manger, transformed here into both display and function.
Throughout the interior, SON’s lacquer red anchors the project. It appears in steel frames, furniture accents, and custom dining elements, turning brand identity into something spatial, tactile, and architectural.
SON brings the organisational logic of the Vietnamese home into a contemporary restaurant. The conditions that once shaped how people gathered, hosted, and shared a meal are carried forward in a new form: material by material, room by room. The logic is inherited. The form is new.
